When social unrest increases, it is easy for a society to blame its poor, who are often disproportionately involved in crime and in prison populations. It requires much more courage to hold accountable, as did Habakkuk, society’s elite and powerful figures and organizations, who customarily project the privileged and institutionalize the disparity between rich and poor.

—Theodore Hiebert, The Book of Habakkuk: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections in NIB VII (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 632.